We have read The Jesus Storybook Bibleso many times that sadly, my kids think THAT is the Bible. And there are some Bible stories they don’t know because we’ve never read them! I’m always on the lookout for new Bible storybooks that aren’t too cheesy or watered down.

This week I got the The Beginning Reader’s Biblefrom Thomas Nelson*. And oh, wow, do I love it! It’s gorgeous–a huge book that’s perfect for laps and for sharing with lots of eager eyes. It even has a bookmark (which Lydia looooves).

It’s actually a real-life Bible with scriptures not stories. The difference is each “story” is told in just a handful of actual scriptures. We chose to read Nehemiah (which the kids didn’t know!) and the story was a collection of about 30 scriptures taken directly from the book of Nehemiah. The kids got the basic gist of the story and heard the actual words of scripture, too. (The scriptures are taken from the International Children’s Bible which I don’t know a lot about because I usually use the New International Reader’s Version. But so far, so good.)

We’ve begun reading this as Asa’s bedtime story. Then the next day we’ll do an activity based on the story. This is super easy because each story comes with a scripture to memorize, a scripture to pray (LOVE THIS) and an activity labeled, “Do God’s Word”. (LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS!)

For Nehemiah, the activity was to make a wall out of pillows and then get inside and pray–thanking God for protecting and surrounding us like a wall. So, we collected some every single pillow in our house and made a wall.

After we read the story again, we decided to get out our swords and build the wall with one hand on our weapons! (4:17-18)

We hopped inside our wall again and held hands. I had the kids repeat a prayer (which is like the cutest thing ever when a 2.5 year old is repeating things like “Nehemiah” and “protection”). They stayed inside the wall for at least an hour–they played with animals, pretended to go night-night and even played doctor.

I loved that they felt comfortable in their little wall. I pray they always feel the protection and comfort of God their Father!

Wanna win this gorgeous new book for yourself? Tommy Nelson is giving 1 away today!

Enter to Win (do one or all, leave a separate comment for each)

• Leave a comment. What’s your kids’ favorite Bible storybook?
• Tweet it! Include @impressyourkids & link to this post http://bit.ly/BeginningBible
• Share on Facebook. It’s easy – just click the “Like” button at the bottom of this post!
• LIKE Impress Your Kids on facebook (see sidebar) or tell me that you already do.

Contest ends Friday March 4.

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the Tommy Mommy Club. As always opinions are my own.

***Impress Your Kids has some new digs at ohAmanda.com! Come visit us there for all the Impress Your Kids archives and all our new posts–including our Easter newsblast with fabulous tips for celebrating a meaningful Easter with your kids!***

Vanessa is a regular contributor to Impress Your Kids. She is a stay-at-home mom to an energetic three-year-old, Juliet. They spend their days together reading books, attempting crafts, and occasionally beating tree trunks with large sticks. You can read more about their adventures at Silly Eagle Books

With Father’s Day approaching, I have been trying to get “ahead of the game” and have Juliet make a few homemade gifts for her daddy. (My usual trend is to wait until the night before and hastily throw something together!)

She can’t write yet, but she sure can talk. I decided to record some of her thoughts one afternoon in a “Thank You God for Daddy” poem.

I envisioned her sitting down with me and listening as I explained to her that God made a special daddy just for her. She would immediately be grateful and join me in a prayer of thankfulness for daddies…

That is not what happened at all.

Instead, she sat for about 2 seconds before jumping up and running away.

I yelled to her, “Why are you thankful for your daddy?”

“Huh?”

“How can we thank God for daddy?”

“Look! An airplane!”

Okay. Let’s try this a different way: “What do you like about daddy?”

“Oh. I like when he lifts me up!”

So, for the following ten minutes, as she raced around the backyard, I kept asking her what she liked about her daddy. She got more and more into it and gave me some memorable Juliet phrases. I scribbled them down on my piece of paper to be used later.

After she was in bed, I got on the computer and went to Wordle.net to create the card. If you’ve never used this site, it’s really easy. You just type in whatever words and phrases you would like to appear on your page and then it scrambles it and gives you different font combinations.

Since I wanted my card to read a certain way, I had to do a few things.

1. Words that you want to appear the largest need to be typed in multiple times. I typed in Thank You God for My Daddy at least ten times. (The words will only appear once, but the more “Daddy” s you have, the bigger it will be.)

2. Phrases had to be pushed together. I chose to separate the words with periods, but you could use dashes or some other symbol or even just let the words all run together without spaces.

3. After typing in my words and phrases, I hit the “submit” button and it gave me my first option. I didn’t like it because it read “My Daddy Thank You God” . I kept hitting randomize until I came to the option that I liked the best. You can print out as many pages as you like and even save your creation to a public page if you want to share it with the world.

Try it out! It’s really easy and you can play around with it until you get the look you want. It’s a fun (and free!) way to preserve your kids’ thoughts and cute phrases.

You could use it as a card or even frame it to make it look even more fancy–and hopefully, your gratitude/thankfulness discussion will go better than mine did!

(If you are looking for some good children’s books about daddies, I’ve compiled a Father’s Day Booklist that features our favorites!)

***Impress Your Kids has some new digs at ohAmanda.com! Come visit us there for all the Impress Your Kids archives and all our new posts–including our Easter newsblast with fabulous tips for celebrating a meaningful Easter with your kids!***

Last night Lydia and I did an experiment based on the Seeds Worship Song called “The Mouth”. It’s from the Seeds of PraiseCD. And it is based on Matthew 12:34:

For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.

This is a really fun experiment my husband and I used to do in our children’s ministry. It’s such a perfect example of this verse.

First, I grabbed 2 mason jars, some dixie cups and a bunch of yucky stuff: oil, dirt, mud, rocks and dead leaves. Then I found some yummy stuff lurking in our kitchen: an old can of strawberry soda, some orange juice, frozen cherries and ice.

Lydia and I poured all the gross stuff in one jar. I pretended we were just making something together. I didn’t talk about it being gross or nasty. I let her smell the oil and see what she thought.

Then we filled the second jar with the sweet smelling ingredients.

I asked her, “What happens if I pour out this jar full of dirty stuff?” She said, “Dirty stuff will come out.” So, I poured a little dixie cup full of the oil-dirt drink and a cup of the strawberry-oj. I let her decide which one she’d rather drink.

She easily picked the sweet juice. I let her drink it and she thought it was delicious.

Then I said, “Lydia, let’s pretend this dirty jar is your heart. If you put dirty things in your heart like bad attitudes, whining and disobedience, guess what’s going to come out of your mouth? Dirty bad things.” Then I proceeded to whine and complain as I poured the sludge into a cup.

I showed her the strawberry jar again and said, “But if you can fill your heart with scriptures like Philippians 2:14 and Honor Your Father and Mother and other ones that we learned. Guess what will come out of your mouth? That’s right, good words. Pleasing, gentle, nice words.”

Then we turned on “The Mouth” song again and sang along as we went off to take a bath. I think it was a brilliant (as in bright, not genius!) picture of what God asks of us and desires for our heart! And our lips!

See how easy that was? Use whatever you’ve got to tell your kids about God’s Word!

:: :: ::

Obviously, if you put something like motor oil in the glass, please don’t let your child drink it! You might have a kid who wants to be silly and drink the gross drink. That’s ok, too! You can still discuss the difference in taste between the two drinks. And how it’s a choice to put good things in so good words come out!

{Super Hero Note: As you do this experiment, talk about the different kinds of bad words that can come out of our months–curse words, complaining, arguing, whining, making fun of others and more. (Or just focus on the one your kids have the most problem with!) Explain that these kinds of words do not make us super examples of Jesus. Imagine that dirty nasty drink coming out of your mouth every time you spoke those bad words! Not very super, huh? Instead, when we fill our hearts with good words, songs & scriptures, we’ll easily be able to choose to build others up with our words, say nice things and choose positive words–to have SUPER SPEECH! And that is a SUPER example of how Jesus wants us to be!}

***Impress Your Kids has some new digs at ohAmanda.com! Come visit us there for all the Impress Your Kids archives and all our new posts–including our Easter newsblast with fabulous tips for celebrating a meaningful Easter with your kids!***